Written By mista sense on Thursday, April 12, 2007 | 6:18 AM

I've been ridiculously sick the past few days (not even delicious game cakes can renew my appetite) and am not quite back together yet, but the whole experience-- bed ridden, sniffling, waiting for someone to bring me juice and crackers-- has sent me dangerously nostalgic. With everything we've got at our fingertips these days now, it's easy to forget those days when we hardly even KNEW what we were playing. Shoot the red things, eat the yellow ones. I'll be the blue guy, you be the red one. Even when graphics had evolved a little better, we had weird box art, nonsense manuals, and badly translated dialog-- when there was any.

Gawd, how'd we even pick games back then? I was lucky enough to be the kid of a tech journalist, so I pretty much got to play whatever came in the mail (you could say I've been "reviewing" games since I was single-digits). But I don't think the fact that I hardly ever had more than a vague idea of what was going on was solely due to my age.Epic button mashing, weird sprites, trippy music. Those were the days.

---Okay, okay, I'll bring a better update as soon as I can sit up straight.

(Screenshots are Alien Crush, Monster Lair and R-Type. I played 'em on TG-16.)